There are two other possibilities you skipped over (although one was mentioned earlier).

The first is that they need a habitable planet to expand their population to and for whatever reason have little more in the way of terraforming tech than we have. As such they'd need to avoid massive environmental damage or they'd render the planet useless.

The second is closely related to the first, and that is that they need the expanded biological resources of the planet, again because their terraforming tech isn't adequate to turn a lifeless world into a life-bearing world. That does require some fairly advanced tech, even in terms of being capable of interstellar travel, and/or a very long investment time-frame, which may be to long. Again they'd need to avoid causing massive environmental damage in the process.

And as a loosely related third, why don't they just bring enough troops to make it a moot point to start with? It's possible they don't have enough troops for that, or that whatever method of FTL travel they use is too energy costly to make it practical, forcing them to rely on machinery built post-arrival. Heck, even if they relied on STL generation ships both of those factors could still potentially apply, except that in the latter case they could send a population that would grow large enough that with a heavy warrior focus, and mandatory military service, they could potentially develop a larger military force then we have after they arrive (since they're more advanced tech should allow them to use a massively greater degree of automation in their manufacturing as well as other areas leaving a far greater percentage of their population free for military service).

Now, regarding some much older comments (since I just joined the forum today).........

@johnnylump: Even with factions being based around ideologies I can still see it being realistic to have a somewhat floating number of factions. After all, just because three different large groups have a similar reaction to the aliens arrival, and thus would share an ideology, doesn't mean they'd manage to work together. They could still have ancient grudges or differences that would leave them feeling as if they couldn't work together. In fact, that could even be implemented as a wedge for the aliens to use against those factions that wish to resist them, and make uniting them into a singular force a significant part of growing your own faction to aid it in winning the looming war, unless you want the aliens to win.....

@JulianSkies: You haven't done much digging regarding the setting and history of the Super Robot Taisen (or Super Robot Wars) games have you? The OG titles released for the GBA are actually remakes of SRW 1 & 2 for the SNES, respectively, with all non-original characters and properties removed. That's why the OG in their titles stands for Original Generation. SRW 1 & 2 had units such as Gundams and Zakus running around as well. Heck, think back to that very first battle in OG1, where you don't have any weapons and you attack the aliens by literally ramming them shoulder first. If you're familiar with your Mobile Suit Gundam history you'd know that's also the exact same way that the Zaku I's originally fought, weapons were introduced later according to the backstory. I'm not familiar enough with many of the fine details of SRW 1 & 2, or even 3 really, but it wouldn't surprise me if the pilot for that very first fight in SRW 1 had the backstory of having been one of the earliest Zaku pilots and had just carried that technique over (I do know that his backstory for SRT:OG puts him as having been one of the earliest mecha pilots in the revised story). As such, the premise of the aliens being so peaceful that they have extremely limited weapons tech, allowing us to have an advantage in one area at least, isn't that unrealistic; after all, why would a prey-type species that develops sentience develop anything beyond the most basic of weapons? They'd primarily fight for honor, prestige, and breeding rights, not to outright kill others, and thus by the time they'd be exploring the stars they'd barely have the equivalent of WWII era rifles and machine guns. I agree that it's not very probable, but I can't label it as impossible either, so that definitely works in a sense. Heck, despite the fact that many of the mass produced mechs of SRT:OG are using reverse engineered Aerogator tech most of the Aerogators weapons are only marginally better, and the actual Super Robots themselves, despite some being decades or centuries old, are massively more powerful than everything shy of an Aerogator boss. And don't forget, most of the Aerogator boss pilots are actually humans or cloned humans because the Aerogators themselves are that bad at fighting, with only a few rare individuals actually be better than a 'normal' or 'average' human. It's also why most of their units are AI controlled instead of manned.

Wow, that second reply ended up being rather long, and only marginally relevant to the thread. Sorry about that. Still, unless you were familiar with the Super Robot Taisen details in that post I do think that it could give you a few ideas to work from for Terra Invicta, regarding both motivations and why they are doing some things the way they are (the Aerogators do turn some of the governments of Earth against those trying to protect Earth, so I'd say it could definitely work). Heck, you might even be able to add in them secretly recruiting humans to actually directly aid in the fights for the space battles.

Razmoudah wrote:@johnnylump: Even with factions being based around ideologies I can still see it being realistic to have a somewhat floating number of factions. After all, just because three different large groups have a similar reaction to the aliens arrival, and thus would share an ideology, doesn't mean they'd manage to work together. They could still have ancient grudges or differences that would leave them feeling as if they couldn't work together. In fact, that could even be implemented as a wedge for the aliens to use against those factions that wish to resist them, and make uniting them into a singular force a significant part of growing your own faction to aid it in winning the looming war, unless you want the aliens to win.....

While technically possible, that messes with various economies in ways that would be problematic, either diluting certain resources in nasty ways or letting an ideology override certain hard caps (like number of councilors).

I might have missed this somewhere, what game engine(if any) are you planning to work with and what language will your code be utilizing? Will this be a Uscript or are you using UE4 or Unity instead? I imagine at some point you might be outsourcing code help [on specific projects] to meet personal deadlines and I'm hoping to get a headstart so that I can volunteer to help with the progress.

I thought I read somewhere that it would be Unity due to access to resources and such but I can't find it now and I could be mistaken.

Based on information in Dev Diary 2, I would assume the scenario in TI is somehow similar to first and second Formic Invasion in Ender's Game.

Armies in TI means "multiple modern divisions", rather than small squads in Xcom series. If we need dozens of divisions to fight aliens, there's clearly a full-scale invasion going on, and the aliens are not able or willing to just vaporize all human from orbit. Formics did exactly that in first invasion due to several reasons:1. they want to terraform - or "xenoform" earth for colonization rather than just glass it.2. individual formic are extremely expendable that a full-scale invasion is cost-effective.3. due to limitation of interstellar travel, they just send a single scout ship (albeit a large one) for the first invasion. It is disabled during certain event, thus Formics are unable to glass earth when invasion failed.

The second Formic Invasion is actually a huge colony ship send along with first one due to limitation of interstellar travel. Since the scout ship failed, formic have to cannibalize part of colony ship and gather raw material in solar system to manufacture warships. Aliens in TI may be unable to "just steamroll humanity" for the same reason.

dethraker wrote:I might have missed this somewhere, what game engine(if any) are you planning to work with and what language will your code be utilizing? Will this be a Uscript or are you using UE4 or Unity instead? I imagine at some point you might be outsourcing code help [on specific projects] to meet personal deadlines and I'm hoping to get a headstart so that I can volunteer to help with the progress.

I thought I read somewhere that it would be Unity due to access to resources and such but I can't find it now and I could be mistaken.

Yep, we're using Unity. And, yep, one of the reasons we're using it is the wide availability of off-the-shelf assets. Plus, Amineri took a look at UE4 and said we'd have to start coding pointers.

And thanks for your interest. We're chewing on bringing on another dev soon.

johnnylump wrote:Thanks! The best way to ensure you know when it launches is to sign up for our mailing list, on the site's front page.

I've been signed up for the newsletter for years I think, and I don't believe I've ever actually recieved a mail from you about anything. I'm wondering whether you don't send anything or if perhaps my spamfilter eats it or something?

hm.. I was really hyped for this game, till I read, that there wont be tactical combat... I love Grand Strategy Games, playing all pdx games, but in this case, I hoped you guys would even extend tactical combat... but maybe you can introduce something like Special-OPs missions, where tactical combat is important .. maybe optional or as a mod later on... well, I will keep following the development, hoping tactical combat ala xcom will take place